


Four to Go

by Jinx72



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Also Jesse forgets that Blackwatch is better than Deadlock was sometimes, Blackwatch, By himself, Gen, I love him really I do, If you don't like reading Southern accents then this isn't the fic for you, It's mostly Jesse tho, They certainly try though, it's okay no one dies, mission goes wrong, my poor cowboy, poor boi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-09
Updated: 2017-10-09
Packaged: 2019-01-15 04:16:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12313596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jinx72/pseuds/Jinx72
Summary: Jesse is on a Blackwatch mission which goes rather wrong.He's had enough near-death situations after this one.





	Four to Go

It was chaos. These kind of fights always were, though. Often dark, but if there was daylight it was often smothered by smoke and fumes. Explosions seemed to go off every other minute. The silence of the night would be shattered by gunfire until all that could be heard was a cacophony of harsh orders being shouted, the _crack_ of countless gunshots and the screams of those dying from wounds too dreadful for anyone to suffer. Jesse McCree, a now young man of 18, ducked into an alleyway to hide from the deadly hail of bullets which slammed into the wall by his head. He rolled behind an overflowing skip and let out a shuddering breath, trying to get rid of the building tension which was making his chest tighten uncomfortably. It helped, a little.  
_“McCree! Where are you?”_ he heard his commander, Gabriel Reyes, shout over their communicators. He breathed shakily into his, trying to stay as quiet as possible. The gunfire had stopped, but that wasn’t a saving grace. That meant the enemy were looking for more things to shoot.  
“I-I’m hidin’ in an alley,” he stammered, carefully peering around the corner of the skip and immediately withdrawing as he saw a person with their back to him standing at the mouth of the alleyway. Jesse’s breathing picked up rapidly, and he reloaded his pistol as silently as possible with shaking hands. “I migh’ be c-cornered,” he mumbled, hating the scared stutter that crept into his words.  
_“What were you nearby before you hid?”_  
“I dunno, and I can’t check.”  
Jesse’s breath froze in his throat as he heard five, six, seven, eight sets of footsteps enter the alley.  
“We know you’re here!” Someone, a woman, maybe, shouted.  
“I’ve been found,” Jesse whispered, trying not to sound as pathetic as he felt. His breathing was hitched and panicky.  
_“Stay calm, Jesse,”_ he heard his friend, Genji Shimada, say. _“I will find you.”_  
“We _will find you,”_ Reyes corrected.  
“Yer gonna need to be fast, then.”  
_“How fast?”_  
“About now’d be nice.”  
“Step out from there!” the woman shouted.  
_“Stall for time. You’re good at that,”_ Reyes ordered curtly.  
So Jesse tried.  
“What if I don’t want to?” he shouted back to the woman.  
“Then we chuck a grenade in the trash with you and leave you there where you belong,” the woman retorted. “Hurry up before we do.”  
“Shit.” Jesse’s breathing hitched again, and he wanted more than anything to curl into a corner and hide.  
“Ten,” the woman said. Jesse frowned in confusion, risking a peek at the eight enemies blocking him in.  
“Nine,” she continued. Fear rushed through him as Jesse realised what she was doing. “Eight.” The agents standing in front of him all took a step backwards as he scrambled to his feet, his aim true as he shot six of the agents dead between the eyes and set off at a run away from them, further into the alley.  
He was panicking. He didn’t remember that it was a dead end. He was fumbling to reload his pistol as he heard the click of a gun being cocked and turned to see one lined up with his forehead. Jesse’s eyes widened, and he tried to step back, but the cold, rough brick of the alley’s back wall pinned him there. Breathing frantic, thoughts racing, unbidden tears coming to his eyes, Jesse stared at the barrel of the gun. “Well _shit,”_ the woman stated in disbelief, not lowering the gun. “You’re just a kid.”  
Jesse’s eyes flicked from the gun to the woman holding it. She had dark hair tied back in a no-nonsense braid and shockingly blue eyes. The rest of her was covered in black clothing, complete with a bandana over her nose. Jesse’s hat tipped forward over his eyes and he reached up to set it back when he saw the finger on the trigger twitch. He froze, a hand on his head. Finally, he fumbled out a few words. “It’s just a hat.”  
He straightened his hat and brought his hand down again, noticing there was another black-clad person standing behind the woman, keeping an eye on the street a fair distance away. “And that’s just a gun,” she commented, gesturing to Jesse’s pistol, which he was holding tightly at his side. “Put it down.”  
Jesse went to holster it, but the woman growled and he watched that trigger finger twitch. _“Drop it.”_  
Unwilling to drop the inherited weapon, Jesse slowly crouched down to place it on the ground carefully before straightening up, hands empty. The anxiety he’d felt before was building higher as he had nothing in his hands. He hated being unarmed. His beloved pistol, which was his father’s, hardly left his side, and if it had to, another gun tended to be around the teen. He would’ve even settled for a baseball bat or a crowbar if it meant he had a weapon, but here he was, unarmed, alone and with shaking hands in the air as Jesse looked down the barrel of death between his eyes.  
“Who are you?” the woman demanded.  
“Just a kid, apparently,” Jesse shot back. Despite his nerves, he needed to play it cool and stall for time. He needed to stay alive for his rescue team.  
She rolled her eyes, but there was some level of mirth hidden in their icy coldness. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t kill you right now.”  
“Because I’m cute?” Jesse retorted, flashing a million-dollar-grin and fluttering his eyelashes. The woman stared, not expecting that. Jesse withheld a smirk. He knew he had looks, and he knew how to charm the scales off a rattlesnake. Hopefully he could use that to his advantage.  
The man standing behind the woman huffed an irritated sigh, fed up with Jesse’s shit. That snapped the woman back to, and Jesse’s expression darkened slightly. The woman laughed. “You got a lot of guts to flirt with the lady who’s trying to kill you,” she taunted, wiggling the gun back and forth slightly. Jesse’s mouth dried out as he tried not to panic uncontrollably. “Maybe I like that in a woman,” he said, trying not to croak as he desperately prayed for Reyes to _hurry the fuck up._  
She laughed again, but the man behind her growled “Just shoot the kid already and let’s get out of here.”  
She turned her head to glare at the man, to chide him, but Jesse saw an opportunity, however fleeting, and seized it with both hands.  
Literally.  
He grabbed the barrel of the gun lined up with his head and jerked upwards. The woman, startled, fired, the shot ricocheting off the crumbling brickwork.  
To his relief, he heard Reyes in the not-too-far-distance shouting his name. 

“I’m here!” he hollered, punching the woman in the gut. He ducked around her as she doubled over, tackling the man who’d been aiming at him. Unfortunately, this man was too well built and Jesse too scrawny for him to take him down, but he did slam the man against the wall. The man’s gun went off as well, slicing through the fabric of his left pants’ leg and grazing the skin, drawing a line of blood. Jesse hissed in pain, but leapt back to deliver a punch to the man’s jaw. He heard the reloading of a gun behind him. Jesse turned to defend himself from the woman when the man, who’d recovered quicker than he’d expected, grabbed him from behind in a headlock. The woman lined up the gun again with his head, and Jesse noticed with a stab of repulsion that it was his own six-shooter pistol. The man slowly began to choke him. Jesse’s frantic breathing turned to desperate scrabbling for air as he raked his fingernails helplessly across the man’s forearm. “Gabe!” he cried out. “Genji! Anyone!”  
“No one’s here to save you, pretty boy,” the woman mocked, her glittering blue eyes cold and cruel. “Don’t kill him yet,” she told her companion. “I want to do it.”  
The man shrugged and loosened his grip slightly. Air rushed back down Jesse’s throat, but he still felt light-headed as he began to hyperventilate. “Gabe!” he screamed, frantic in his panic. “Help me!”  
His killers laughed mercilessly at him. Then, the woman aimed down and shot him in the foot.  
Jesse screamed.  
“One for the money,” she said sarcastically.  
She aimed at his knee. “Two for the show,” she continued, firing again.  
Jesse begged for her to stop.  
“Three to get ready,” the woman taunted, ignoring his desperate pleas and the tears on his cheeks and the blood that was freely pooling around the teen’s feet. She shot him in the stomach.  
Jesse threw back his head and howled in agony, his voice cracking and breaking.  
“And four to-“  
The gun had been travelling up to his eyes before the woman was interrupted by a shotgun shell that took an opportune moment to bury itself in her skull. She fell immediately, trailing a spray of blood behind her as she and the pistol went down, the gun clattering across the cobbles. The man holding Jesse let him drop, grabbing for his gun, turning to face his opponents but never had a chance. Even before Jesse’s knees hit the stone beneath him, the man was dead, a katana buried up to the hilt in his chest, its owner having lunged forward with supernatural speed the man could never have been prepared for. The katana’s owner, Jesse’s cyborg friend Genji, pulled it out and sheathed it immediately, kneeling down beside his friend. “Jesse!” he exclaimed.  
Jesse whimpered, his breathing fast and pained. He heard other heavy footsteps running up to them and looked up to see the stern but concerned eyes of his commander, Gabriel Reyes, standing over him with the rest of the team. He watched with hazy vision as Reyes holstered his shotguns and also crouched down. “Jesse,” he said plainly, somehow conveying a lot in a single word. Concern, worry, anger, frustration, and maybe else. Jesse didn’t care. He let his head drop as he sat back, trying to straighten out his leg. Hissing, he looked up at teammates as they winced. “Laura, watch our six,” Reyes ordered. Laura, a young woman of 24, saluted briefly and went to stand at the mouth of the alleyway.  
“Jesse, we got you,” Reyes murmured quietly, his words only intended for the young man in front of him.  
Jesse’s frantic breathing gradually slowed as that registered. He nodded once, curtly. He turned his head to look at the woman, who was lying dead on the ground with a large halo of blood pooling around her head. “My… my gun,” he said, nodding at the woman. “She had it.”  
“Genji,” Reyes asked, in that way that wasn’t really a question.  
Genji was already moving, lithely rising to his feet and stepping around Jesse. He walked over to the dead woman, plucking Jesse’s pistol off the street next to her already stiff hand and kicking her in the stomach for good measure as he went by. He returned the gun to Jesse, who holstered it immediately, already looking calmer.  
“Did ya do it?” Jesse asked Reyes.  
“Mission complete,” Reyes confirmed, carefully rearranging Jesse on the ground so he could lift him. Jesse grimaced, a pained whine escaping his lips before he could stop it as his newly acquired wounds were jostled. As they left the alley as a unit, Jesse asked a question. “If y’all were finished,” he began, his voice quiet against the crunching of footsteps. “Why’d you come back for me?”  
Reyes froze midstep, staring down at Jesse incredulously. Everyone else stopped, staring at him with looks of mixed confusion. “Why wouldn’t we?” someone, a tall man called Alexander, asked.  
Jesse fumbled for words, not expecting this near-interrogation. “I-I mean, that’s how it goes, righ’? You finish the mission and you get the hell outta there. If someone gets stuck that’s their problem…” Jesse’s voice gave out at the end and his head dropped into his chest, his hat successfully hiding the tears which continued to stream down his face. He was reciting rules from his old gang. It hurt more than he expected it to, being reminded that where he’d been almost all his life, the only family he really had would’ve left him to die in a heartbeat.  
He flinched as Reyes tilted his hat up with a flick of his index finger. “That might’ve been how it worked at Deadlock,” Reyes told his sternly, but not unkindly. “But that’s not how we roll here. You aren’t just an agent. You aren’t just a name. You’re a person, a teammate. A _friend,_ Jesse. We aren’t leaving you behind just because you got yourself cornered.”  
“And besides,” Genji said, appearing at Reyes’ elbow like a ghost. “Who would pose any challenge to me in training if we left you here?”  
Jesse chuckled. “I’m sure you could find someone.”  
“Sir, we need to move,” another person said. Reyes nodded.  
“McCree,” he said, striking up mission formalities again.  
“Yessir?”  
“We’ll get you patched up on the ship. Anything else whilst we’re here?”  
Jesse glanced down the alleyway. He made sure he had his hat. He made sure he had his gun.  
“No, I’m good,” he told his commander.  
Reyes rolled his eyes good-naturedly, amused at what the teen considered important.  
As the unit began to move, Reyes didn’t put him down or loosen his grip. Genji stayed by them, sword drawn but hanging loosely from his grip by his side. The others formed a circle around the commander and the injured in his arms. Jesse smiled. This might’ve been the safest he’d felt in a long time. It didn’t take long for Jesse to fall into an exhausted sleep, resting his head on Reyes’ chest. 


End file.
